The holidays are around the corner, and now is the time for business owners to appear to all those holiday shoppers looking for the best gifts. It is a highly competitive time of the year, and business owners work very hard to craft holiday marketing strategies that will help them stand out and increase their sales. There are many things you can do to make sure you also drive sales by appealing to all those holiday shoppers.

Here are four tips that will help you gain exposure and sell more this season:

1.    Plan and Start Early

Did you know that 20% of consumers start their holiday shopping in September? That’s why starting early may be the best way to tackle the holiday season and get more exposure! SEO can take time to update and refresh rankings, so planning ahead and crafting your content early will help you gain exposure right when holiday shopping starts. You can build a strong holiday marketing strategy by choosing the right keywords, creating the best content, and making appealing ads!

2.    Create a Seamless Mobile Experience

It is no surprise that more and more shoppers choose to do their holiday shopping, read customer reviews, and compare products through their mobile devices. This year, it is estimated that over 45% of online holiday traffic will come from mobile. That is why you should make sure that your website, store, and user interfaces are mobile optimized. Giving shoppers a quick and seamless navigation can be make a difference when choosing to make a purchase.

3.    Build Seasonal Paid Search Campaigns

Paid search is one of the most important ways to increase brand exposure during the holidays. Shoppers constantly search for the best gifts, make product comparisons, and look for the best prices on search engines. That is why ad impressions see a 50% boost during the holidays! Building a seasonal campaign, adding some holiday keywords, and making creative descriptions and headlines can help you stand out, especially if you use holiday sitelinks with a specific holiday landing page!

4.    Use Available Data to Make Strategic Decisions

Last year’s data is fully available, and you can use it to make sure you craft the best holiday marketing strategy. Do some research to find out what keywords worked best, how much they cost, and which ones may work well for your products and services. Having this information can help you put together a strategy that will get you in front of holiday shoppers and ensure an increased number of conversions.

Happy selling!

B2B ecommerce has seen immense growth, doubling in almost every sector in the US since 2003, with predictions saying more is coming in 2017 and beyond. Manufacturers and distributors are taking advantage of this trend, recognizing the opportunity to capitalize on the increased traction. Want to take advantage of the growing ecommerce industry, grow your business, and strengthen your customer relationships?

Know Your Customers

For effective inbound marketing, you must center everything around your audience. Think not only about businesses in whatever niche your company serves, but about the employees in your target industry. Influencers and stakeholders in your target audience may involve multiple departments and should be considered in your overall strategy.

To make sure you’re on the right track, create personas and work from there, adjusting based on what data reflects as time goes on. Compare your conversions to your personas and make changes based on the conversions themselves until you have an accurate representation of your market.

Create a Robust Product Catalog

Make research easy. Create a detailed catalog, complete with search, sorting, and filtering options to make it easier for your potential customers to find the products that fit their needs, regardless of complexity. This also empowers your customers to customize orders to their individual needs.

Use Highly Descriptive Product Listings

Since B2B sales often involve multiple people within an organization, it’s important to show value and benefits. One of the easiest ways to do this is to appeal to everyone in the chain of command with your product listing copy. Beyond descriptive language, use high quality images and video to show off your offerings.

Be Mindful of the Longer Sales Cycle

If your products are specific and multiple people play a role in the purchasing process, the sales cycle can last anywhere from a few weeks to more than a year. Marketing through these longer cycles is a definite challenge. Rely on a powerful CRM to help you manage all your contacts, so you can keep track of where your leads are in the buying cycle at all times to improve the customer experience.

Nurture Leads with Content Marketing

Because of that longer sales cycle, nurturing your leads is even more important that it is in the B2C arena, and becomes as essential to lead generation. With content marketing, you can create compelling material to engage potential customers. In addition to informative blog posts, you can create white papers, newsletters, webinars, infographics, and more. When a lead downloads your content, use the contact information to follow up with targeted email marketing to continue nurturing through the decision process.

Use Split-Testing to Optimize Conversion Rate

The specificity of a B2B niche means you’re working with a smaller pool of potential buyers. It’s much easier to sell a laptop to a student than it is to convince businesses in your target market your products will improve their business. High conversion rate matters. To keep things as efficient as possible, your website, ecommerce features included, must be tailored to serve your audience. With split-testing tools and other analytics, you can determine the copy, colors, placements on the screen, and more, with the best impact on conversion rate. Run one split test at a time and continue refining the approach until you’ve found the most effective way to capture and convert your leads. When you find the magic formula, keep using it – but be ready to adjust as the market demands.

Successful B2B ecommerce doesn’t happen overnight, but through dedicated effort and clear strategy, you can draw more customers in, keep those customers happy, and watch profits soar.

How Content Marketing Makes Every Other Marketing Channel More Effective

Sponsored by MOJO Small Business Partner: Scripted

It’s a digital world and today’s marketing professionals know that if you don’t make an impact online, you don’t exist. Staying relevant is more difficult than ever. The search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that worked last year are obsolete. Social media strategies that once brought in the crowds now barely register a blip. Search engine marketing is getting more expensive and less efficient as more competitors learn how to use it well.

Fortunately, there are still great tools to dramatically improve the effectiveness of your marketing. Content marketing is one of those force multipliers that unleashes the potential of the rest of your marketing operation, making it cheaper and more effective – if you do it right.

Good Content Naturally Improves Organic Traffic

The key word here is “good”. If you are still filling your site with bold, underlined keywords that are completely out of context, you can be sure your site’s rankings are negatively impacted. Today’s search engine robots can spot keyword stuffing at a glance.

Adding useless links to your page is another antiquated digital marketing method. You will no longer get credit for quantity over quality. Search engines are interested in your ability to add value for web users, which means your links must guide visitors to relevant, useful information.

When you do it right – by creating useful and interesting content – those pages will rank well on search engines for relevant keywords, which is the best way to create reliable organic traffic. As you collect pages that rank well, you’ll also see better SEO performance for your website’s main pages. Congrats! You’re collecting “Domain Authority”, which means that Google and similar services see you as an authority in your field and are more likely to rank any page on your site higher.

Higher Domain Authority Equals Cheaper SEM

Improving your domain authority is great for bringing in organic traffic, but it also has other fantastic benefits. One of the biggest benefits is cheaper SEM.

Google uses a wide range of factors to decide whose ads will appear for certain keywords, and whoseads will appear at the top. These factors are summed up in the quality score of your ad, and one of the most important contributors to your quality score is domain authority.

Think of it this way: Even if I purchase ads for a quick blog post on Medium about the latest events in Iraq, Google doesn’t want my little blog post to outrank a recent article on the same subject from the New York Times.

When you use content to establish higher domain authority for keywords that you’re targeting in ads, your quality score will go up, which means that you’ll pay less for higher placement and more clicks. More traffic, less cost – what’s not to love!

Good Content Makes Great Social Media Marketing Collateral

You put out your content and everyone loved it. After a few days of praise, your great post settles in for a long life of bringing in a continuous trickle of leads through organic traffic. It’s a good retirement.

Except that’s not the end of the story, or at least it shouldn’t be. Once you create a piece of content that people respond to, it’s time to find ways to repurpose it.

Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographic, or even just a nice image, good social media strategists know that if it’s worth posting once, it’s worth posting again. They’ll also tell you that posting to social media isn’t just about courting existing followers. Good content can be converted into ads and promoted posts that will attract new visitors to your profile and website.

Turning social media into an effective marketing channel requires good collateral anyway so you’ll hit two birds with one stone by investing in good content

Strengthening Your Brand Through Content Marketing

Content that people love doesn’t just drive traffic to your website, it inspires the people who enjoy it to share with their friends and colleagues. Innovative content marketers know that the likelihood of social media shares increases dramatically with the quality and variety of content. For example, a useful video, a funny image or a well-written blog post is far more likely to gain traction than an amateur attempt at content creation.

There are some striking statistics that SEM experts are incorporating into new content creation:

• When a colorful visual aid accompanies text, the likelihood of users reading the text increases 80 percent.
• Content published with accompanying images typically gets 94 percent more views that text-only content.
• According to 51.9 percent of digital marketing experts, video content enjoys the best return on investment.

The vast majority of those people won’t turn into customers right away. In fact, you might not see even a blip in sales the day after a post gets 10,000 unique views.

But now there are 10,000 people who know the name of your company who didn’t before, and they associate you with an expert piece in a relevant industry. That’s brand strengthening in action.

Large companies pay millions of dollars for television and billboard ads to do the same thing that you just did with a blog post. You’ve seeded those 10,000 people so that, when they see your next post or ad, they’ll already trust in your brand and be more likely to click.

Investing in content marketing isn’t just about making a cool blog, it’s an essential tool in the modern digital marketer’s arsenal for increasing efficiency across a range of marketing channels. And remember, the sooner you get started, the quicker you’ll see an effect. So what’s stopping you?

When you think about the number of tools you have at your disposal to help you run your business smartly, you might be happy to have so many options. But at the same time, it can be overwhelming to have so many different tools that you have to log into and manage. It’s easy to let things fall between the cracks.

That’s why tools that offer multiple functionality or integrate with other tools are so hot right now. Think about the social media dashboard that lets you manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram rather than you having to log into each separate site. That’s power that saves you major time.

The same goes for customer relationship management software (CRM). CRM that offers multiple functionalities keeps you from having half a dozen tools to get the same effect.

Take project management. It’s something every company needs in order to stay on top of project tasks and deadlines. And yet, if your project is tied directly to a customer, does it really make sense to have a separate project management platform from your CRM?

More and more, we’re seeing CRM platforms with baked-in project management features. The benefit to these platforms is that there’s no gap between the client data and the project management tasks. All the files, assignments, milestones, and due dates are in one place.

1. Projects are Easier to Manage

Let’s say you have a writing project for a client assigned to your best writer. Under this client’s profile, you assign the project to the writer and create a due date. She can sync that task to her Google calendar so she doesn’t even need to log into the CRM to view it.

But if she does log in, she can access your notes from your phone call with the client, view documents of past writing projects to get a sense of writing style, and then upload the documents when she’s completed the work. Everything related to this project and client are in one place. One login. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

2. Teams Have Better Communication

Teams that collaborate can easily see where each team member is on a project, what needs to be done in order to complete it, and any files that relate to the project. You don’t waste time hunting for a document on your computer or Google Drive, only to realize someone else has it or has modified it since you last viewed it.

3. Reports are Easy to Run

If you need to find out the status of a given project, you can easily run project reports from within the CRM that provide data on what’s been completed and what’s still pending so you can address any project bottlenecks that could potentially hold a project up.

4. Nothing Slips Through the Cracks

Not only can you view your assigned tasks on the CRM’s calendar, but you can sync it with your Google or Outlook Calendar so you don’t miss anything. Then, you’ll get email reminders as a backup.

Using CRM with built-in project management capabilities just makes sense. Being able to get a 360 view on both a client and the work you do for him from a single place cuts down drastically on the time you’d otherwise spend on several tools and websites.

Why companies are moving to the cloud

The sport of business is a competitive one and, increasingly, companies are using cloud-hosted business tools as an advantage to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. The rapid movement to cloud-hosted phone systems is a case in point, as IT teams endure the limitations, frustrations and cost of managing their traditional or custom-built systems.

Check out these 8 reasons your company could benefit from the cloud:

Looking to Make a Switch?
Vonage Business Can Help.

Our hosted platform empowers businesses with a full suite of feature-rich communication solutions. Every business is different, and our teams work with you to deploy a solution that serves your organizational priorities and integrates as desired with existing technology. A partnership with Vonage Business comes with ongoing support, technology on demand and the reliability of the Vonage Cloud.

7 ESSENTIALS to Help Your New Business Thrive

If you’re starting a new business, you’ve got to make the most of every investment dollar. That’s the essence of futureproofing: making wise decisions now so you don’t have to retool and reinvest as your business evolves.

A cloud-based phone system can play a significant role in futureproofing a new business. Consider these 7 essentials for helping your new business thrive:

The idea of “futureproofing” your business definitely requires foresight. Fortunately, today’s cloud-based phone systems are equipped to help your startup business work efficiently, grow and prosper.

As we were building the Golfoholics community on Facebook (facebook.com/golfoholics), we quickly became aware that the posts that generated the most engagement – by far – were static images. So we did some homework to see if that’s what other brands were experiencing and found a study by SocialBakers that looked at the top 100 pages on Facebook and found that static images generated 87% of all engagement.

And when we sat in on a Twitter webinar last year, they told us that tweets with images generated 313% more engagement than those without. But we’re Mad Men by trade, and our advertising instincts told us that if that is so, we damn well better be branding those images or we were missing out on a huge opportunity.

Now in advertising, you usually work in creative teams that consist of a copywriter and an art director. More often than not, the copywriter comes up with the words, and the art director is responsible for the design of the ad. But in social media, that’s terribly inefficient, particularly for small businesses. Content creation for social is often a one-man or woman job, and you don’t have the luxury of an art director spending weeks crafting a well-designed post. So you’ve got to do it yourself.

And I’m not one of those folks who is well-versed in Adobe InDesign. I needed a tool that would let me quickly and easily brand our social visuals. So I put together a brief business plan, went out and raised some friends and family funding, and found myself a good development partner. Months later we gave birth to a prototype of what we called PostCreator, and put it up on Facebook for free to see if people might like it.

Turns out they did, so we raised a bit more money and developed a pro version that lets you upload an image, overlay a headline, embed your logo and post directly to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Today, PostCreator has more than 5,000 subscribers, creating engaging branded social visuals for authors, bands, realtors and eye doctors to national retailers like Brooks Brothers.

And our Golfoholics community has swelled to more than 68,000 golf addicts who are highly engaged in the content we create and post through PostCreator. You can take a look at the types of posts subscribers are creating here

PostCreator in Action

Today’s small business owners wear more hats than ever – sales and marketing, IT and finance, and more – as they seek to streamline processes and cut costs in an increasingly mobile environment. Fortunately, they’re discovering that Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) can help them meet these broad challenges without the need for onsite IT staff to manage on premise systems.

Small businesses are faced with three big challenges when it comes to communications technology: One is always being accessible to the customer. The second is having technical resources available in order to help implement and maintain a system. And third is tying their communications system into other aspects of their business such as accounting. Making all those things work together is where the real magic of unified communications becomes a reality for the small business.

1) Always-on Accessibility
Small business owners are now engaged with a rapidly evolving workplace, 45 percent of whom are millennials. In fact, that number that is expected to skyrocket to 75 percent by 2021. This increasingly mobile and distributed workforce expects their “office” to be wherever they are located – whether that is at home, in the car, visiting a customer or even at a local coffee shop. Therefore, it’s no surprise that, according to the SMB Group, a growing majority of small businesses now regard mobility as an essential business enabler, with 60 percent saying mobile solutions are critical to their business.

Mobility is a key benefit to communications in the cloud. Mobile apps can fully integrate with the phone system, enabling employees to make and receive business calls and text messages when they’re on the go, maintaining a consistent business presence, and accessing the same robust voice, video and messaging features they enjoy in the office. Additionally, with bring your own device (BYOD) on the rise – 59 percent of small businesses with 10 to 999 employees now support BYOD – dedicated mobile apps enable employees to keep their business and personal accounts separate on the same device.

2) Technical Resources
Additionally, with 27 percent of small businesses indicating they have no IT support, UCaaS makes things easy by giving small businesses seamless access to new features as they become available, providing them with the ability to scale up or down as needed, adding phone lines with the click of a mouse.

3) Systems Integration
Finally, a UCaaS solution can easily integrate CRM solutions, billing software and more with a VoIP phone system to extend the power and control of the phone system to a desktop. This helps small businesses become more efficient by leveraging the business-class tools they already use, wherever employees are and whenever they need to use them.

Satisfying the unique needs of small businesses, UCaaS solutions provide cost-effective, scalable, feature-rich communications that can help them successfully compete with companies many times their size. This frees up business owners to focus on their bottom line, not their communications system.